Navigating Relatedness in the Era of Assisted Reproduction

What makes someone a parent? For most of human history, the answer seemed obvious: genetics and birth. But today, a child may be born from one woman’s egg, carried in another woman’s womb, and raised by a third person entirely – with a sperm donor adding yet another layer to this web of relationships. Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) – including egg and sperm donation, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and surrogacy – have fundamentally restructured how we understand family, parenthood, and kinship. They don’t just help people have children; they raise entirely new questions about who counts as kin.

Kinship was never purely biological
How ART reconfigures who a parent is
Egg and sperm donation
Surrogacy and the question of motherhood
The extended kinship networks that form around donor conception
Cultural, legal, and ethical complexity
What children say about their own origins
Relatedness is made, not just given

Kinship was never purely biological

Before exploring what ART changes, it helps to understand what kinship actually means. In anthropology and sociology, kinship refers to the network of social relationships that a culture recognizes as family – not just genetics. Anthropologists identify three main categories: consanguineal kin (blood relations), affinal kin (relations through marriage), and fictive kin – people treated as family even without biological or marital ties, like a close family friend a child calls “Aunt.” This last category is critical, because it shows that human societies have long recognized bonds of care and belonging that exist independently of genetics.

As anthropological research makes clear, kinship is something cultures actively construct. In some societies, sharing food or living together creates bonds of relatedness. Schneider’s influential work in the 1980s challenged the Western assumption that “blood is thicker than water” is a universal truth, arguing it is a culturally specific value – not a biological law. Assisted reproduction has taken this insight and pushed it into entirely new territory.

How ART reconfigures who a parent is

Third-party reproduction is the umbrella term for any arrangement involving someone other than the intended parent in the reproductive process. This includes donated eggs, sperm, or embryos, and gestational carriers (surrogates) who carry a pregnancy for intended parents. Each of these arrangements separates elements of parenthood that were once inseparable: genetic contribution, gestation, and social parenting.

Egg and sperm donation

When an individual or couple uses donated gametes, the child they raise may have no genetic link to one or both of them. Yet research consistently shows this does not diminish the quality of parenting or family bonds. A landmark longitudinal study by University of Cambridge researchers, which followed assisted reproduction families from infancy to age 20, found that the absence of a biological connection between children and parents does not interfere with positive parent-child relationships or psychological wellbeing. The researchers also found that young people in these families were generally unconcerned about their origins – many describing their social parents simply as “mum” and “dad.”

Interestingly, research on gamete donors shows that egg and sperm donors themselves experience their role differently. In the USA, sperm donors are more likely to describe themselves as “fathers” to donor-conceived individuals than egg donors are to describe themselves as “mothers” – a finding researchers attribute to gendered understandings of reproductive bodies and the social organization of donation itself.

Surrogacy and the question of motherhood

Surrogacy introduces the most visible complexity. In gestational surrogacy – now the most common form – the surrogate carries an embryo created from the intended parents’ (or donors’) eggs and sperm, meaning she has no genetic link to the child she carries. In traditional surrogacy, the surrogate also provides the egg, making her the genetic mother. According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the term “gestational carrier” is now preferred for the former arrangement precisely to mark this distinction.

As scholars of the new kinship studies note, surrogacy disaggregates motherhood into at least three distinct categories: genetic, gestational, and social. A single child can have up to three women involved in their origin – egg donor, surrogate, and the parent who raises them – none of which cancel out the others. Legal systems around the world struggle to keep up, resolving questions of parentage case by case and often differently across national borders.

The extended kinship networks that form around donor conception

One of the most sociologically fascinating dimensions of assisted reproduction is the entirely new type of kinship network it generates – the donor sibling network. Children conceived using the same sperm or egg donor share genetic material with potentially dozens of half-siblings they may never have met, scattered across different families and countries.

Research on donor-conceived adolescents finds that when these young people learn about and connect with their donor siblings, many report feelings of surprise and curiosity, but also a meaningful sense of belonging. Some form genuine close relationships; others treat donor siblings as a looser network – valuable for medical or genetic information, but distinct from the siblings they grew up with. Crucially, even where ties remain loose, a sense of collective identity as genetic relatives persists. Membership in a donor network, even a weak one, opens doors to deeper social bonds over time.

Studies of sperm donors in the UK reveal another layer of complexity: many donors find themselves unable to clearly categorize their relationship to donor-conceived individuals. They describe a connection that is real and meaningful, yet doesn’t map onto any familiar kinship role – not quite a parent, not a stranger. Some donors frame the relationship as analogous to being the sibling of their own children – a new form of relatedness for which language barely exists.

This linguistic gap is telling. Sociologists studying donor conception observe that the decision to donate reverberates through donors’ everyday lives and relationships in ways that are not easy to articulate. The experience creates what researchers describe as a new kind of personal relatedness – one that existing vocabulary and social scripts were never designed to handle.

Cultural, legal, and ethical complexity

The expansion of kinship through ART does not unfold evenly or without tension. Legal frameworks vary enormously by country. In Sweden, for example, the principle that the woman who gives birth is legally the mother has been enshrined in law since 2003, even in egg donation cases. Gestational surrogacy remains unregulated, creating complex legal disputes for parents who use cross-border surrogacy arrangements. These patchwork policies mean that the kinship a family recognizes socially may conflict with what the law recognizes officially.

The ethical stakes are also high. Research on transnational commercial surrogacy, particularly in countries like India before regulation tightened, highlights deep inequalities. Many surrogate mothers came from economically marginalized backgrounds, undergoing health risks – including repeated hormonal treatments and caesarean sections – in an unregulated industry. The financial compensation, while significant by local standards, rarely lifted families out of poverty. These dynamics raise serious questions about whether “choice” is truly free in all surrogacy arrangements.

At the same time, scholars working on queer kinship and reproductive justice emphasize the importance of self-determination in family formation – the right of individuals, especially LGBTQ+ people, to build families without coercion or stigma. Assisted reproduction has made parenthood possible for same-sex couples, single parents by choice, and those with fertility challenges – expanding the circle of who gets to be a family.

What children say about their own origins

Perhaps the most grounded perspective on relatedness in assisted reproduction comes from the children themselves. A UK longitudinal study of adolescents conceived through surrogacy, egg donation, or sperm donation found that the majority felt largely indifferent about the circumstances of their conception – yet most also expressed curiosity about the third party involved, whether donor or surrogate. Many were in contact with them or open to being so. This is not confusion or distress; it is a nuanced navigation of a genuinely new social reality.

The Cambridge research also found that early disclosure matters. Young adults who were told about their origins in childhood communicated more openly with their families than those told later or not at all. Among sperm donation families, only 42% of parents had disclosed by age 20, compared to 88% of egg donation families and 100% of surrogate families. The secrecy around sperm donation in particular – often driven by fathers’ reluctance to disclose – affected family communication quality in measurable ways. Transparency, it turns out, strengthens rather than undermines family bonds.

Relatedness is made, not just given

What ART ultimately illuminates is something anthropologists have argued for decades: relatedness is actively constructed through care, shared experience, and social recognition – not passively inherited through genes. Even within medical ethics frameworks, the value placed on maintaining genetic kinship varies enormously from family to family – some prioritizing it deeply, others finding it irrelevant beside the bonds formed through daily life.

The families formed through egg donation, sperm donation, and surrogacy are not lesser or more complicated versions of “real” families. They are families that make visible what was always true: kinship is a social achievement as much as a biological fact. The donors who contributed genetic material, the surrogates who carried pregnancies, and the parents who raise children are all part of an expanded kinship network – one that different families navigate in different ways, with different degrees of contact, openness, and meaning. There is no single script, and that may be precisely the point.

What do you think? As genetic testing makes it increasingly easy for donor-conceived people to find biological relatives, how should families approach conversations about origins and connection? And does knowing a child has a genetic link to a donor or surrogate change how you think about who belongs to that child’s family?

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Table of Contents

Kinship was never purely biological 🔗

How ART reconfigures who a parent is 🔗

Egg and sperm donation 🔗

Surrogacy and the question of motherhood 🔗

The extended kinship networks that form around donor conception 🔗

Cultural, legal, and ethical complexity 🔗

What children say about their own origins 🔗

Relatedness is made, not just given 🔗